The Lotus Eaters (53 page)

An untouched plate of chorley bread, yellow and smelling buttery, sat on the table in front of Chapayev. Besides the bread was some greenish dip with a dead fly next to the shallow bowl.

Chapayev was in mufti, and unshaven for the past several days. Worse, he had the appearance of a man who had been drinking pretty heavily for all those days. Perhaps worse still, he looked like he didn't care.

Samsonov took one look and thought,
I was afraid of this. On the other hand, I was also afraid he'd bring the little tramp back here and she'd be fucking my officers—just like she did back in Volga—and upsetting my mess.

The legate took a deep breath, exhaled, and walked to sit at the table where Chapayev sat alone, a half empty glass and a clear bottle directly in front of him, between the table's edge and the bread.

"Victor, what are you doing back so soon?" Samsonov asked.

"It didn't work out, sir," answered Chapayev in a voice totally devoid of emotion.

Samsonov didn't want to ask for details. He could guess at these well enough, anyway. Instead, he just said, "Well, these things happen. I'm sorry, Victor, for what it's worth."

"Yes, sir. So am I. Nothing to be done about it." A corpse would have shown more feeling than the Volgan tribune did. "So . . . I had nothing else to do. After finishing up the interviews and the shopping, I came back here."

"Well, I can't put you back on duty now. You're still convalescing."
And now you have two things to heal from, don't you, son? Too much of a burden to let you bear while still doing your job? Too dangerous to leave you alone to mope? Can't make a decision like this sober, and it's too early to for me to join you in a drink.

Samsonov continued, "Tell you what, Victor. You look like the very devil. Go to your quarters and sleep a while. Consider that an order. I'll pick you up at eighteen hundred for dinner. There's a restaurant down town I've been meaning to try. Then we'll get stone blind, paralytic, ossified drunk. Tomorrow I'll decide whether you should resume your duties or finish your leave . . . or maybe something else. We'll see."

* * *

Chapayev said barely a word as he ground his way mechanically through his food. Only his glass of vodka held any real interest for him, a glass Samsonov kept constantly refilled from a bottle left at the table by the waiter.

On his fourth large glass, and plainly feeling it, Victor blurted out "She was pregnant when I got there. Several months."

Samsonov, who knew Chapayev's schedule for the last two years as well as Chapayev did himself, simply said, "Oh. I see."

"No, sir, it was much worse than that." Then Chapayev told his commander all the vile things Veronica had said to him in the Saint Nicholasburg apartment the week before. Tears welled in the tribune's eyes.

"Victor . . . there is nothing I can say to you that will make it any better . . . except, maybe, that these things pass . . . the pain, I mean. You are not the first; you will not be the last. And for whatever it is worth to you . . . she's lost more than you have."
The fucking bitch,
Samsonov added silently.
I should offer a bounty for the cunt's life to the next group I send home on leave.

Pride was stung, too. "What can I tell my company? All this time I've been telling them of my 'peerless' Veronica; the light of my life. How can I face them now? They'll think I'm a fool."

Samsonov sighed. "My friend, every man is a fool sometimes. Especially concerning women. And it wasn't exactly your fault. The regiment called you; you had to go. I'd wager you are not the only one; even in your company. You were just unfortunate . . . or maybe fortunate . . . to have found out."

Samsonov was silent for a moment. "But I do see your problem. Stay with the regiment and risk being laughed at behind your back, or go back to Volga . . ."

"There is nothing left for me there, sir. It's a place where foreigners speak the same language you do, nothing more."

"Yes. Well, I only mentioned it as an option. Or, maybe . . . ?"

Again Samsonov grew quiet, thinking. After a few moments he said, "Victor, I have a requirement to provide several officers, six initially, to become a sort of cadre for 'second formations' at the military schools. I don't know any of the details.
Duque
Carrera already thinks well of you. How about if I call him tomorrow to nominate you for one of those positions?"

"You mean I have to leave the regiment?" Chapayev looked, if possible, even more crushed.

"No, no, I don't think so. I had the impression you would still be part of the regiment, but on detached duty for some years. We have no combat action in the offing, just helping train the legions here. This might be more challenging work. You would, I imagine, be working with boys for the most part."

"Veronica always said she wanted children," Chapayev said, his voice dripping with half drunken bitterness. "I actually did, but it was 'never the right time.' Very well, sir, call Carrera." The tribune shrugged, hopelessly. "After all, as low as my life has fallen, what have I got to lose?"

It was a low hill, with a pleasant sea breeze, overlooking the southern terminus of the Transitway. Its name had come from the parties of construction workers, a century previously, who had taken advantage of the breeze for their drunken revels on their infrequent breaks from construction work. Now, it was a training area. Also was it a designated mosquito feeding area. Similarly, it was a howler monkey breeding reservation. The last two designations were unofficial, but real for all that.

With monkeys howling their rage in the distance, and mosquitoes coming in for suicide runs altogether too close, machine gun fire, blanks, rattled in the moist night. Xavier Jimenez listened to the fire, trying to judge its exact direction.

Jimenez keyed his radio to the controller push and asked what the trouble was.

"Monkeys, sir," came the answer. "Stinking monkeys spooked the troops and caused them to go to full stand-to and then to open fire."

"Roger."

Tsk
, thought Jimenez.
That will cost you, boys.

* * *

On the hill itself, grumbling headquarters troops cleared their weapons and filed back to the bunkers and bedrolls. Before being spooked, they'd been fully clothed and had their weapons nearby. Now-

"That's right, sweetie-pies," said the regimental sergeant major, his booming voice carrying clearly across the hill. "Off with the boots and uniforms. You spooked once. The price of that is war is a slower reaction the next time. So we're making your reaction slower by having you strip down."

* * *

Patricio said in his last training brief that this would be a way to train people to take advantage of surprise
, thought Jimenez.
I confess, I have my doubts. Still, worth a try.

* * *

There were a number of things, in training for war, that were simply hard as Hell to simulate. One of these was to provide an opposing force that was both challenging and realistic when training people for reconnaissance patrolling. Another was giving them a realistic portrayal of surprise, so they would learn to recognize when they'd achieved it and to take advantage of it.

Carrera's last training guidance had addressed both.

"Look," he'd said. "When you send troops out on a recon, in training, you've got a choice of either no realistic probability of them running into opposition, or you have the very unrealistic technique of vectoring an enemy patrol in on them. Or . . ." he hesitated a moment to see if anyone had figured it out. When no one offered a solution, he'd said, "Or, you can have the patrols, for a company say, start around the edge of a rough circle and the objectives be toward the center. That way, there's a
strong
chance of chance contact and they will have to
act
as though there is.

"You've got a similar problem—a little similar, anyway—when you try to train to create and take advantage of surprise. You can choreograph it. You know what? The troops know choreography when they see it. And they don't believe in it. And they don't think, not deep down, that the training was legitimate.

"Or, you can—"

* * *

By three in the morning, the defenders—who had had to defend nothing yet—were tired, and frustrated. All three moons had gone down, leaving the area plunged into complete blackness, except for the distant glow from Cristobal, across the bay. Worse, they were bootless and stripped down to their skivvies (that was from the first false alert), their weapons' slings were tangled (from the second), and their body armor, their
loricae
, were piled up (from the third false alert). In each case, the speed with which they could react to a real attack had been artificially but realistically slowed. Thus—

* * *

Jimenez swatted at a mosquito buzzing his left ear when he heard over the other radio, "Zulu Six Seven this is X-ray Five One. Fire Target Group Bravo."

"Six Seven, Five One; roger, over . . . shot over . . . splash, over."

Trees were instantly silhouetted as artillery simulators began whistled and exploding all over the hill, from military crest to reverse slope. There was fire, both rifle and machine gun, coming from the hill. Yet it only came from the quarter of the defending troops who were allowed to be fully alert, strung out mostly in observation and listening posts around
Loma Boracho
.

Jimenez saw another explosion flash through the trees, followed by what he thought were probably antaniae, winging it upwards to escape the blasting.

Nasty fucking moonbats
, he thought.

"Breach One, clear," said the radio. A second explosion followed. "Breach Two, clear."

Jimenez pulled his night vision goggles onto his face and looked northwest. This was the direction from which the 8th Tercio commander had briefed him that the breach team would blow through the wire. Sure enough, he saw twin files of armed men rising from the jungle floor to dash forward toward the breaches in the hill's perimeter wire.

A crump overhead and just past the position turned into a mortar illumination round. The casing whistled down to impact in the nearby bay. Cursing, "Shit!" Jimenez removed the goggles as Loma Boracho lit up almost as brightly as day. Another
crump
from the same direction as the first told that the next round was on the way.

On cue—
as if
on cue, at any rate—evaluators redoubled their throwing artillery simulators, pyrotechnic devices that whistled for several seconds before exploding with a fairly realistic flash and bang. Machine gun fire—still blank, the only live ammunition being used were the mortar illumination rounds—erupted from outside the perimeter.

* * *

In the bunkers pandemonium erupted as half naked troops shook themselves out of sleep and struggled to find and free uniforms, boots, rifles and armor. Evaluators stood by the bunkers to ensure no troop left without being fully dressed and equipped. Men cursed as heads bumped and hands and feet were trod upon.

This was not to say that all the defenders left with their own gear. More than one soldier ended up in clothes too big or too small in the rush. By ones and twos, except where a leader had the presence of mind to organize before moving—the defenders began to filter to their perimeter through the trenches.

Under cover of the suppressive fire from the machine guns, and smoke from hand held smoke grenades, teams from the 8th Tercio were already through the wire and beginning to enter the trenches. Here and there evaluators tapped soldiers of the 8th, making them lie down as casualties. The cry "medic" arose from half a dozen throats.

In their ones and twos the defenders tried to slow down the avalanche of combat power overwhelming their position. It was to no avail. Throwing grenade simulators ahead of them, 8th Tercio's storming party drove the headquarters troops back and further back.

Not all of the cries for medical support were simulated; the grenade simulators could cause nasty burns and mild concussions. As the evaluators had rehearsed, an evaluator accompanied the forward elements of both sides, both to assess casualties and to pull unwary soldiers out of the way of the simulators' explosions.

This is fucking great!
thought Jimenez. He recollected something Carrera had said in the training brief:
Many senior commanders don't enjoy training their soldiers unless they can maneuver their entire units. I have found that these men typically have fragile egos. The best trainer of combat troops is usually the one who can enjoy the fun his small units are having.

"Well, I'm having fun, anyway," Jimenez muttered, as another series of explosions, more grenade simulators, moved a prong of 8th Tercio's attack closer to the center of the Loma Boracho position. Jimenez walked forward to oversee the final assault.

Two white men, Volgans, in mufti, stood on a spit of land on the west side of the old town's roughly rectangular harbor. A centuries-old stone fort watched over the harbor's mouth, as it had for all those centuries. The fort's seaward gun ports were sighted to intersect and interlock with those of another fort across the water on the eastern side. At the bay's mouth was a tree-covered island. It seemed to float on the water. For that matter, people who had stared at the island long enough had been known to say the thing was moving.

Behind and around the two men, more or less surrounding the fort, arose the barracks and classrooms of the academy. Work still continued on some buildings, an irregular pounding of hammers interspersed with a drone of heavy machinery.

Sitnikov, leaning with one hand resting on a verdigris covered bronze cannon, asked, "Well, Victor, what do you think?"

His companion, Victor Chapayev, nodded. "It is adequate."

Chapayev wore an air of inestimable sadness. Sitnikov knew as much of Chapayev's story as Samsonov had thought he needed to know. He could guess at the rest.